Jun 4 (edited) • Physics
Does Reality Really Exist? Some say "No!" Really?!?!?!
A lot of people think that quantum mechanics proves that reality isn't really real, if that makes sense. That somehow, things don't become the things they actually are until they are observed by a human mind, and then reality is reality only relative to someone else's reality. Sabine Hoffessenfelder brings some common sense into this area.
When I first heard about Wigner's interpretation of the wave function as representing what one knows and not what actually happens I remember bursting out loud saying "Well, there's your problem right there!" With apologies to the woo-woo community, there's nothing fundamental about consciousness. It's just another process that exists inside the neural clockworks that make up the brains of certain animals. Consciousness evolved as a survival mechanism. What if the instruments in the woo-woo camp's thought experiments gave a wrong reading because of an experimental bias? What if you read the dial incorrectly, but believed the number you wrote down in your lab book? What if you're delusional and you see things that no one else can see? Do they somehow really actually exist in the physical universe that you inhabit, but not in the universes that everyone who interacts with you? How can you be part of my universe but none of the other people in my reality can see the lava on the ground that you're screaming about? Your delusions can be incompatible with the known laws of physics, or do all the laws of nature truly reform in your physical reality and then spontaneously shift back as your liver removes the toxin that was causing you to perceive that the ground was lava? When I dream that I can fly, do I suspend the laws of physics in a way that has no affect on my wife sleeping beside me?
Probability does represent what you know about the system. When a gameshow host presents door #1, #2, and #3, he damn well knows that the car is behind, say, door #3. But from the contestant's point of view, with no knowledge of the actual state of the system, there is no reason to prefer one door from the others, and so she correctly understands that her probability of getting the grand prize is equal for each door. Her odds change as soon as her knowelge of the system changes. Two people can therefore have different probabilities associated with the outcome of the same event. But probabilities in quantm mechanics aren't about quantifying human ignorance. They are all about what has and has not actually happened, regardless of what anyone knows about the event. I have long suspeced that confusion over statistical probabilites and quantum probabilities may be the source of the error.
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Does Reality Really Exist? Some say "No!" Really?!?!?!
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